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shadowkatI've been re-reading the Sandman comics, and listening to the audiobook, prior to seeing the series on August 5 - when all eleven episodes begin streaming on Netflix.
From the Guardian article on Neil Gaiman:
"Gaiman may be enjoying phenomenal success now, but he started in comics, then considered the literary gutter. The mid-80s was an exciting time to be involved with the medium, and Gaiman – working as a freelance journalist – was well aware of it. “In 1986, I pitched a story about what was happening in comics,” he says. “At that point Maus, The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen were all coming out. One newspaper replied: ‘We’ve written about Desperate Dan’s 50th anniversary this year – we can’t do another comics piece.’”
Gaiman was eventually commissioned by a Sunday newspaper supplement to do a feature on comics. “It would have been a big cover article. I did all the interviews and gathered together art, including unpublished material.” But it was not to be. “They didn’t call back,” continues Gaiman. “After a few days, I phoned the editor to ask if he got the article and he said: ‘Yes, I’ve read it. There’s just one problem – we feel it lacks balance. These comics – you seem to think they’re a good thing …’ What I was saying was that there was this whole flowering of the medium, and what he wanted was for me to interview people who felt that comics were the end of literacy.” Gaiman was, of course, proved right. Maus by Art Spiegelman went on to win the Pulitzer prize. The Dark Knight Returns was a bestseller that reached readers far beyond comics audiences. Watchmen by Alan Moore was named one of Time magazine’s top 100 novels since the magazine’s inception.
The late 80s saw a kind of “British invasion”, a migration of talent to the US that was to change the face of comics. This was largely due to Karen Berger, visionary editor of DC Comics, home to Batman and Superman. First, Berger commissioned writer Alan Moore to work on the horror title Swamp Thing. Moore’s run raised the bar for what was possible in a monthly comic. The door was open. Scottish writer Grant Morrison followed. Taking on the lacklustre superhero team Doom Patrol, he twisted it into his own surreal, psychedelic image. Now anything seemed possible.
This was the context for the largely untried Gaiman to enter the picture. The way DC comics worked was to offer these young British upstarts an unimportant existing character to play with, as a way of minimising risk. Gaiman was offered The Sandman, a minor character who had appeared in two incarnations over the years, neither of them very successful. Gaiman was encouraged to make the character entirely his own and was given free rein to make any changes he saw fit. Even with this tabula rasa, Gaiman was nervous.
“Bear in mind, at this point I’ve written and sold maybe four short stories and [comic miniseries] Black Orchid. And now I’m going to have to do a monthly comic,” he says. “And I have no idea whether or not I can do it. I don’t think I have the engine to write a superhero comic. I’ve watched what Alan Moore does, what Grant Morrison does. These guys have superhero engines, they can do them; I don’t have that.”
Gaiman needed another way in, and it came via a US science-fiction author. “Roger Zelazny did a book called Lord of Light, where he did science-fictional gods who feel like superheroes,” says Gaiman. “It’s set in a world in the future where a bunch of space explorers have given themselves the powers of the Hindu pantheon. I thought: I can’t do superheroes, but I could do god comics. I bet I could get that kind of feeling to happen, and it might feel enough like a superhero comic to fool people.”
Gaiman’s version of the Sandman is Morpheus, a handsome goth as comfortable in a flowing cape of velvety shadows as he is in stove pipe jeans and a T-shirt (all in black, of course). He’s one of the Endless, seven immortal siblings who are the embodiment of natural forces: Death, Desire, Destiny, Despair, Delirium, Destruction and – in Morpheus’s case – Dream. Like all mythological deities, Morpheus’s almost unlimited powers don’t protect him from heartbreak and jeopardy. In fact, Gaiman delighted in exploring the fallibility and essential humanity of these figures. Morpheus’s immortality also allowed Gaiman to set his stories in every era, from deepest prehistory to the far future, as well as providing a snapshot of modern culture. It was an audacious concept for a superhero series.
With this magic equation in place, Gaiman’s “god comic” took off. Rich with literary allusions and foregrounding strong female characters, The Sandman found audiences outside the usual legion of fanboys. It became essential reading on college campuses – for both male and female students. “Back then, DC always did a year before they cancelled a title,” says Gaiman, “so I figured at issue eight they’d phone me up and say: ‘Well, minor critical success, major commercial failure. You’ve got four issues to wrap it up!’ Then I’d be done. That would be The Sandman. Instead, we got to issue eight, and we were selling more than anything comparable had ever sold within the last 15 years.” His confidence buoyed up by the sales, Gaiman was determined to do precisely what he wanted with the comic, supported by his ally Berger. “I knew this was the only chance I was ever going to get to put all the stuff that I loved in a comic,” he says, “so if I wanted to do a retelling of [Roman historian] Suetonius’s Life of Augustus as a homage to the poet Robert Graves, I was only going to get to do that once. The luckiest thing I had was an editor who trusted me.”
ales climbed – particularly when the comics were collected in paperback book form and made available outside of comics shops – but critical acclaim was slower to follow. “In 1989, I was at a Christmas party for some magazine that was at the Groucho Club,” says Gaiman. “I got talking to somebody who, if memory serves, was literary editor at the Telegraph. They asked what I did, and I said I wrote comics. The gentleman looked as though I’d slapped him with a herring, but he couldn’t just stop talking to me and turn away, so he asked: ‘Oh well, what kind of comics?’ I said I’d written a thing called Violent Cases and that I was writing a thing called The Sandman. He said: ‘Hang on, you’re Neil Gaiman?!’ I said: ‘Yes.’ He said: ‘Oh my dear fellow, you don’t write comics, you write graphic novels!’ I felt like a hooker who’d just been called ‘a lady of the evening’.”
A successful writer can enjoy a whole career without creating a classic. Gaiman created his right out of the gate. To those who read it, The Sandman was as much a part of the 90s as Twin Peaks and Nirvana. It may not have initially had audiences on the same scale, but it created an icon of its writer. “In 1997, I went for a meeting at Warner Bros. I don’t even remember what it was about,” says Gaiman. “I’m with my new agent. The meeting doesn’t go anywhere, and when we get downstairs there are a couple of what would then have been called secretaries at their desks. As we pass one of them says: ‘Excuse me Mr Gaiman – would you sign my Sandman?’, which I do.
Rest of article can be found HERE. He lucked out. A woman wouldn't have been able to do it. There were almost no women writers of comics in the 1980s and 90s, oh there were a few, but it was a tough biz to get into back then.
The Sandman Creator Explains Why He Tears Down Online Trolls.
The buzz on this is good. Gaiman executive produced and writes the first episode and is involved with all the episodes. He also was involved in the casting and production design. And he runs a very safe and kind set.
"I know the rule is you’re meant to ignore the trolls and not feed the trolls,” Gaiman admitted. "But I would look at people sounding off on Sandman who were obviously not Sandman fans. What I would watch would be 60,000 Sandman fans going, 'Of course you’re doing it this way. Of course you have a non-binary Desire, Desire was always non-binary, that’s brilliant casting.' Or 'Gwendoline as Lucifer, what amazing casting.' And then you’d get five or six people trying to make a lot of fuss who never read Sandman in the first place. And I mostly decided I was done with it."
Gaiman went on to say that while he sometimes feels he should ease up on his retorts, he thinks his general response is warranted given how hard the cast and crew has worked on the show. "Occasionally I do feel like I’m taking an enormous sledgehammer to squash the tiniest ants, and you really shouldn’t," he said. "But then again, they can be really irritating sometimes, and I’m proud of what we made."
He's kind of funny about it. He squashed the one whinging about his casting choices not being reflective of the artist's renditions or versions in the comics, and the artist not getting a say - by simply stating, well actually he did. I consulted him and he agreed with me.
Or the people whinging about Lucifer not being a hunky guy - aka Tom Ellis, and he said, "not my problem" and "actually my Lucifer looked more like an androgynous David Bowie. (He's absolutely right his does. So does Mike Carey's - which Ellis's series is based on. In Carey's Lucifer comics - Lucifer doesn't have any genitalia - he's non-binary. In other words - a they not a he. Angels are "They" not she/he, they are not binary creatures in Gaiman's verse or Carey's.
If you read the comics - you'll pick up on it pretty quickly. I've read both Carey and Gaiman's. In fact, Ellis' Lucifer series doesn't fit the comics much at all - it's one of the reasons that I gave up on it. I found it jarring. I liked the comics better. Lucifer is interesting in the comics, in the "Lucifer" television series he's a 12 year old putz in an adult male body. Which was fine for a bit - until it got annoying.
On another note - no we didn't win the megamillions, someone in Illinois got it.
From the Guardian article on Neil Gaiman:
"Gaiman may be enjoying phenomenal success now, but he started in comics, then considered the literary gutter. The mid-80s was an exciting time to be involved with the medium, and Gaiman – working as a freelance journalist – was well aware of it. “In 1986, I pitched a story about what was happening in comics,” he says. “At that point Maus, The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen were all coming out. One newspaper replied: ‘We’ve written about Desperate Dan’s 50th anniversary this year – we can’t do another comics piece.’”
Gaiman was eventually commissioned by a Sunday newspaper supplement to do a feature on comics. “It would have been a big cover article. I did all the interviews and gathered together art, including unpublished material.” But it was not to be. “They didn’t call back,” continues Gaiman. “After a few days, I phoned the editor to ask if he got the article and he said: ‘Yes, I’ve read it. There’s just one problem – we feel it lacks balance. These comics – you seem to think they’re a good thing …’ What I was saying was that there was this whole flowering of the medium, and what he wanted was for me to interview people who felt that comics were the end of literacy.” Gaiman was, of course, proved right. Maus by Art Spiegelman went on to win the Pulitzer prize. The Dark Knight Returns was a bestseller that reached readers far beyond comics audiences. Watchmen by Alan Moore was named one of Time magazine’s top 100 novels since the magazine’s inception.
The late 80s saw a kind of “British invasion”, a migration of talent to the US that was to change the face of comics. This was largely due to Karen Berger, visionary editor of DC Comics, home to Batman and Superman. First, Berger commissioned writer Alan Moore to work on the horror title Swamp Thing. Moore’s run raised the bar for what was possible in a monthly comic. The door was open. Scottish writer Grant Morrison followed. Taking on the lacklustre superhero team Doom Patrol, he twisted it into his own surreal, psychedelic image. Now anything seemed possible.
This was the context for the largely untried Gaiman to enter the picture. The way DC comics worked was to offer these young British upstarts an unimportant existing character to play with, as a way of minimising risk. Gaiman was offered The Sandman, a minor character who had appeared in two incarnations over the years, neither of them very successful. Gaiman was encouraged to make the character entirely his own and was given free rein to make any changes he saw fit. Even with this tabula rasa, Gaiman was nervous.
“Bear in mind, at this point I’ve written and sold maybe four short stories and [comic miniseries] Black Orchid. And now I’m going to have to do a monthly comic,” he says. “And I have no idea whether or not I can do it. I don’t think I have the engine to write a superhero comic. I’ve watched what Alan Moore does, what Grant Morrison does. These guys have superhero engines, they can do them; I don’t have that.”
Gaiman needed another way in, and it came via a US science-fiction author. “Roger Zelazny did a book called Lord of Light, where he did science-fictional gods who feel like superheroes,” says Gaiman. “It’s set in a world in the future where a bunch of space explorers have given themselves the powers of the Hindu pantheon. I thought: I can’t do superheroes, but I could do god comics. I bet I could get that kind of feeling to happen, and it might feel enough like a superhero comic to fool people.”
Gaiman’s version of the Sandman is Morpheus, a handsome goth as comfortable in a flowing cape of velvety shadows as he is in stove pipe jeans and a T-shirt (all in black, of course). He’s one of the Endless, seven immortal siblings who are the embodiment of natural forces: Death, Desire, Destiny, Despair, Delirium, Destruction and – in Morpheus’s case – Dream. Like all mythological deities, Morpheus’s almost unlimited powers don’t protect him from heartbreak and jeopardy. In fact, Gaiman delighted in exploring the fallibility and essential humanity of these figures. Morpheus’s immortality also allowed Gaiman to set his stories in every era, from deepest prehistory to the far future, as well as providing a snapshot of modern culture. It was an audacious concept for a superhero series.
With this magic equation in place, Gaiman’s “god comic” took off. Rich with literary allusions and foregrounding strong female characters, The Sandman found audiences outside the usual legion of fanboys. It became essential reading on college campuses – for both male and female students. “Back then, DC always did a year before they cancelled a title,” says Gaiman, “so I figured at issue eight they’d phone me up and say: ‘Well, minor critical success, major commercial failure. You’ve got four issues to wrap it up!’ Then I’d be done. That would be The Sandman. Instead, we got to issue eight, and we were selling more than anything comparable had ever sold within the last 15 years.” His confidence buoyed up by the sales, Gaiman was determined to do precisely what he wanted with the comic, supported by his ally Berger. “I knew this was the only chance I was ever going to get to put all the stuff that I loved in a comic,” he says, “so if I wanted to do a retelling of [Roman historian] Suetonius’s Life of Augustus as a homage to the poet Robert Graves, I was only going to get to do that once. The luckiest thing I had was an editor who trusted me.”
ales climbed – particularly when the comics were collected in paperback book form and made available outside of comics shops – but critical acclaim was slower to follow. “In 1989, I was at a Christmas party for some magazine that was at the Groucho Club,” says Gaiman. “I got talking to somebody who, if memory serves, was literary editor at the Telegraph. They asked what I did, and I said I wrote comics. The gentleman looked as though I’d slapped him with a herring, but he couldn’t just stop talking to me and turn away, so he asked: ‘Oh well, what kind of comics?’ I said I’d written a thing called Violent Cases and that I was writing a thing called The Sandman. He said: ‘Hang on, you’re Neil Gaiman?!’ I said: ‘Yes.’ He said: ‘Oh my dear fellow, you don’t write comics, you write graphic novels!’ I felt like a hooker who’d just been called ‘a lady of the evening’.”
A successful writer can enjoy a whole career without creating a classic. Gaiman created his right out of the gate. To those who read it, The Sandman was as much a part of the 90s as Twin Peaks and Nirvana. It may not have initially had audiences on the same scale, but it created an icon of its writer. “In 1997, I went for a meeting at Warner Bros. I don’t even remember what it was about,” says Gaiman. “I’m with my new agent. The meeting doesn’t go anywhere, and when we get downstairs there are a couple of what would then have been called secretaries at their desks. As we pass one of them says: ‘Excuse me Mr Gaiman – would you sign my Sandman?’, which I do.
Rest of article can be found HERE. He lucked out. A woman wouldn't have been able to do it. There were almost no women writers of comics in the 1980s and 90s, oh there were a few, but it was a tough biz to get into back then.
The Sandman Creator Explains Why He Tears Down Online Trolls.
The buzz on this is good. Gaiman executive produced and writes the first episode and is involved with all the episodes. He also was involved in the casting and production design. And he runs a very safe and kind set.
"I know the rule is you’re meant to ignore the trolls and not feed the trolls,” Gaiman admitted. "But I would look at people sounding off on Sandman who were obviously not Sandman fans. What I would watch would be 60,000 Sandman fans going, 'Of course you’re doing it this way. Of course you have a non-binary Desire, Desire was always non-binary, that’s brilliant casting.' Or 'Gwendoline as Lucifer, what amazing casting.' And then you’d get five or six people trying to make a lot of fuss who never read Sandman in the first place. And I mostly decided I was done with it."
Gaiman went on to say that while he sometimes feels he should ease up on his retorts, he thinks his general response is warranted given how hard the cast and crew has worked on the show. "Occasionally I do feel like I’m taking an enormous sledgehammer to squash the tiniest ants, and you really shouldn’t," he said. "But then again, they can be really irritating sometimes, and I’m proud of what we made."
He's kind of funny about it. He squashed the one whinging about his casting choices not being reflective of the artist's renditions or versions in the comics, and the artist not getting a say - by simply stating, well actually he did. I consulted him and he agreed with me.
Or the people whinging about Lucifer not being a hunky guy - aka Tom Ellis, and he said, "not my problem" and "actually my Lucifer looked more like an androgynous David Bowie. (He's absolutely right his does. So does Mike Carey's - which Ellis's series is based on. In Carey's Lucifer comics - Lucifer doesn't have any genitalia - he's non-binary. In other words - a they not a he. Angels are "They" not she/he, they are not binary creatures in Gaiman's verse or Carey's.
If you read the comics - you'll pick up on it pretty quickly. I've read both Carey and Gaiman's. In fact, Ellis' Lucifer series doesn't fit the comics much at all - it's one of the reasons that I gave up on it. I found it jarring. I liked the comics better. Lucifer is interesting in the comics, in the "Lucifer" television series he's a 12 year old putz in an adult male body. Which was fine for a bit - until it got annoying.
On another note - no we didn't win the megamillions, someone in Illinois got it.